Wednesday, November 11, 2009

New Bar Night: Tempest, Showdown, Rickhouse

Any pussy can go to one bar. It takes a fucking VILLAGE to go to three. By "village" I mean me, Olu and Jason. If your village was an AA meeting.

First stop: Tempest, on Natoma between 5th and 6th, behind the flailing Chronicle. Nice bar! A little brightly lit, but better to see the jackoffs taking up three tables. Oh, sorry, I don't mean to be salty. We had a good time. PBR and shot of Jim Beam, $5 all the time. What could be wrong with that? Nothing, that's what. Jason came and put an old Mark Twain folio on the bar and everybody gave us mad props after that. Maybe it was the Spongebob action figure he got from Burger King that he also put on the bar, I'm not sure. You can smoke in the Tempest, but only BEHIND THE RED LINE, like a painted line on the floor confers immunity from lung cancer. Pool table. Japanese chick w/ passport. Good bar.

Second stop: Showdown, 6th Street near Mission, in the old Arrow Bar space. No immediately apparent website, which makes sense, because it's only a notch up from Arrow Bar, like malaria is a notch up from H1N1. Here's what you need to know about Showdown: Jason saw a guy there who he has personally 86'd for life from the Gold Cane. 86'D FOR LIFE FROM THE GOLD CANE. That basically means you built a meth lab on the bar at the Gold Cane and then refused to sell any meth to the bartender. Not Jason. He doesn't do that. Anyway, Guy 86'd From Gold Cane was basically fucking this wasted methy blonde chick at the bar. Gross. When they realized they couldn't consummate their affair for the ages right there, they ducked over to the men's room. Romantic. Next to the men's room door, there was some refrigerator box or something. I don't know why. They shimmy in between the door and the box and BOOM I see the chick's tennis shoe with a foot still in it flop up on top of the box. Olu had to go to the bathroom. I said "Not right now." Shoe comes down, bathroom door opens and closes. Horrifying. No stars.

Third stop: Rickhouse, everybody's new hotness with your artisanal cocktails and blah blah blah. We begrudgingly liked it. Begrudging because there were a lot of striped shirts and FiDi types crowding up the place and making it harder for me to get my drink, which was bourbon, Punt E Mes, infused pixie dust, and tears, with ice cubes carved out of a glacier in Norway. It was OK. I love the interior, but it's all very carefully crafted to look Bar-y, like Pirates of the Carribean for drunks.

since the rickhouse is open at noon, the trick is to go there at 1, after the lunch drinkers are gone, but before the markets in the east coast have closed, precipitating a tide of douchebags. sorry, FiDi types...

About Me

TK lives and works in San Francisco. He occasionally travels to places east of the Caldecott Tunnel, but not very often. His interests include bars, reality TV, and irony. Things seem to be going fine.